


something else, something more.

by beeluvd



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Can be interpreted as platonic or romantic - Freeform, Developing Friendships, Emotional Hurt, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, I just enjoy these 2 so I wrote about them lol, I'm not ur mother I can't tell u how to read, M/M, Psychological Trauma, There IS comfort but it's just very different and more abstract idk you can read it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:07:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28831671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beeluvd/pseuds/beeluvd
Summary: “I’m glad you made it out okay,” Rantaro says halfheartedly, unsure where the conversation is going. Truthfully, he’s not sure he wants it to go anywhere at all.Kokichi blinks, and Rantaro notices. There is something missing. Something is not quite there.“Yeah,” he responds shortly, his eyes fixed in a direction that gears more towards Rantaro’s shoes than his face. They are flat, emotionless, like one of Angie’s blank notebook pages before she fills it with color (or rather, her programmed persona would). He expects Kokichi to elaborate, to say more, but he is met with a stark uncharacteristic silence that he quickly understands is here to stay.Rantaro stares, trying to fill the space in front of his eyes, and Kokichi does not meet them.Something is missing.Something, he realizes over and over again, is not quite there.-Rantaro wakes up. As soon as he can, he leaves the recovery facility before the others do.But recovery is hard.(Not just for him.)-(In which I make my 2 fav characters interact a bunch in the name of self indulgence and also I'm practicing writing these 2. I just think they're neat!)
Relationships: Amami Rantaro/Oma Kokichi
Comments: 7
Kudos: 47





	1. alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hiiii so quick note on the amami/ouma tag: the relationship btwn the 2 can be interpreted as however u want, im not ur mom i cant tell u how to read

How do you get over dying?

Rantaro Amami is still not quite sure. One moment he is in a library in a strange school he doesn’t quite remember going to, turning around and watching a figure with long hair curling at the ends raise something high above their head, the next he is opening his eyes to a blinding light that burns his retinas, listening to voices yell over each other as he tries in vain to understand why he is breathing. 

From the moment he wakes up, Rantaro Amami is alone.

Because Rantaro Amami is the only one who has died.

-

“You’ve been in a comatose state,” the nurses at the recovery facility explain to him. They tell him of Team Danganronpa, of the fabricated personalities, and he realizes that all of his precisely calculated actions, his innate need to survive, was all for nothing.

“ _It was all just a game.”_

-

It all happened so fast.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” The nurses ask him as soon as they’ve managed to get him to a relatively stable state, wires removed and heartbeat more or less steady.

It all happened so violently fast, but he recalls a black and white door. A flash of white light. A dark figure raising their hands above their head. His own reflection for a split second, and then falling limply to the ground.

His eyes harden in concentration, trying to understand why he’d seen the green of his own eyes before going slack on the library floor.

“I don’t know.”

-

For a while, it is quiet.

There are board games and various decks of cards sitting untouched on the shelves in the common area, and one day Rantaro stares at them, almost laughing at the irony.

Because for now, the only person awake is him.

-

Once he remembers the outline of the how (though still murky, he can still figure out some of it), he remembers the why, and once he remembers the why, he remembers the fear. Fear unlike any other. Fear like he had never experienced it before. 

Rantaro thought he knew what fear was when he felt the drop of a high speed roller coaster, or when he’d been stuck in the middle of the ocean during a tropical storm, or each time he had heard one of his sister’s voices right next to him one second and was met with silence in the next. Rantaro thought he knew what real fear felt like. 

But, like he had been so many other times, Rantaro was wrong. 

When you are about to die, or even when you are in the process of dying, your body fights to stay alive, shooting adrenaline through your veins—and as he watched his own eyes widen, reflected in a figure he still cannot put a name to, Rantaro Amami suddenly knew what it was like to be truly afraid.

And as soon as he felt fear, he felt himself falling, the carpet of the library floor cushioning his body as he hit the ground.

-

They play the trial on the TV.

“Your trial,” the hospital staff whisper excitedly, keeping their voices low as though not to wake up other patients in the wing, or perhaps not to disrupt the 15 other people engaged in deep discussion on the screen in the common area. 

Rantaro stares at them in disbelief, because there is no one here but him.

He does not watch, only catching a quick glance of the people he’d known for such a short time confined within that small box mounted on the wall. 

_It was all just a game._

-

“A TV show,” he snorts to himself when he’s alone in his room, away from the questionable glances of the nurses and the prying hands of the doctors.

“What kind of assholes came up with this shit?”

_You did,_ he reminds himself.

_You are the reason you’re here in the first place._

-

While he is alone, he wonders. 

He wonders if his sisters were all just a dream, a false memory implanted into him purely for character development. 

_Cruel,_ he thinks bitterly. 

_Was all of that suffering for nothing?_

He is still not quite sure. 

From the moment he realizes that none of his sisters may have ever even been real, Rantaro Amami wonders if there’s anything left that he is searching for.

-

The trial ends, and he hears the nurses squeal in morbid delight as he hears a girl’s voice cry over the TV. A classical song, one he does not know the name of, begins to float out of the TV’s speakers, slipping through the walls and making its way into Rantaro’s room. It’s pretty, he thinks, and he wonders why the staff would be playing such music during such a class trial. 

_“Kaede will be waking up soon,”_ he hears from a conversation being held outside his door.

Rantaro’s brows furrow in confusion, because _why her_?

-

Days later, the nurses allow the two to meet.

Kaede’s eyes are hollow, but he knows that his are no different. It is awkward and baseless, neither one quite knowing what to say.

“Hey,” Rantaro tries. Truthfully, interacting with someone from the game that saw him dead is not what he would particularly want to be doing right now, but his conscience had told him otherwise. So here they are, sitting at one of the tables in the common area, Kaede’s hands laced so tightly together that he is afraid of her circulation being cut off by her own doing. 

“Hi,” she responds quietly. Her head is hung low, with her hair spilling in messy blonde curtains around her face. This is not the same high spirited, charismatic Kaede that Rantaro had grown to know in the short time that he was alive (ha), but rather an empty, defeated shell of her.

He notices that her nails are bitten profusely, gnawed down to almost nothing.

(He realizes she died with her nails painted in french slants and perhaps that’s when it sinks in that they are not really dead.)

“So,” he begins, rubbing the back of his neck while searching for words.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, so low that he has to strain to hear it.

Rantaro’s brows knit together. “What for?”

“It was me...I killed y—oh, god…” She chokes on her words, and he can hear oncoming tears threaten to make their way into her speech.

His frown deepens in perturbation as he remembers his wide eyes reflected in clear pieces on a silhouette that looked remarkably different from the girl sitting in front of him. The figure is murky, and he still has multicolored splotches swimming around his field of vision because of the white flash from earlier, but he can see green swimming around the small surface of glass situated in front of a face he still cannot make out.

For a while, he says nothing as he listens to her sob quietly into the palms of her hands, trying fruitlessly to remember the last thing he saw before hearing the deafening crack of his own skull.

“Kaede,”

She looks up, tear tracks shining like mirrors on her skin. He remembers his reflection.

“Do you own a pair of glasses?”

The blonde haired girl blinks tears out of her eyes,

Because no. She doesn’t.

-

He memorizes every sharp turn, every clean white wall that confines him in this hospital-esque building. The nurses say not to call it a hospital (“it’s a recovery center!”) but Rantaro knows better.

He knows which walls have wallpaper that is beginning to peel, which corners are easy to stub your toe on, how many board games are piled up on the dusty shelves (14) and how many tables and chairs are in the common area (12 and 36 respectively ). He is not sure if the days are passing by quickly or slowly, because the weather outside is just as stagnant as everything else.

One day, Rantaro peels back the curtain in his room and is met with clouds the same shade of grey as the dreary hospital clothes he’s wearing.

He’s not sure why he expected anything less.

-

“Once we know you’re relatively emotionally stable, we can arrange to have you discharged as soon as possible,” the nurses tell him one day as they take his vitals. Each day is the same: wake up to have his vitals taken, waste time, and then speak to a therapist about a death he only remembers in small increments.

"Since you've had prior experience with this, we feel relatively comfortable letting you out much earlier than the others, since you seemed alright last time."

"Okay," he hears himself saying.

He doesn't remember the "last time."

(All he wants to do is leave.)

-

“I suppose you consider yourself lucky,” the man across from him says as he writes something down a clipboard. 

Rantaro stares at the metal piece at the top of the clipboard that holds an extra pen. It’s shiny and silver, and it does nothing to get the vague image of a gleam of metal out of his mind.

He squints, and the shimmer of silver taunts him, draws him in with no reward, laughing gleefully at his futile efforts to understand.

“For what?” he asks, genuinely wondering.

The grey haired man clicks his tongue.

“Depends. Maybe you feel lucky that you got out first, or maybe you feel lucky that you don’t remember your death in detail. Maybe you just feel lucky to be alive after all.”

Rantaro knows that none of those hold true.

-

Kaede is either found in her room or in the common area, watching their “classmates” on the TV screen. He rarely joins her, only opting to politely ask how she’s doing or if she’s eaten today.

Their conversations are short lived, partly because Kaede is still in a somewhat dazed state of shock, partly because Rantaro is not sure if he can hold a conversation with anyone besides his assigned therapist right now (and even then those conversations are bland and forced).

Today he looks up to see Shuichi spending time with Kiibo, Kaede staring expressionlessly at the screen. The weather onscreen is warm and sunny, and the two are sitting in the green grass outside of the main building, basking in the sun and talking animatedly about something Rantaro cannot hear.

Outside, it begins to rain.

-

He remembers, in small bits and pieces. He remembers his confusion when a shot put ball had apparently fallen from the ceiling and landed with a dull thud on the ground next to him, and how he’d thought it was lucky that it didn’t land on his feet. He remembers a flash of white light, followed by the sound of a door opening, eventually turning around to see his own terrified reflection in the glasses perched on a face he still cannot quite recall; it all happened so fast that he could barely make out the features of the figure, and he curses himself for not taking it in more carefully. He remembers, to his own dismay, crumbling to the floor in a heap of limbs and bones, hearing the sound of his own blood dripping in small drops out of his skull for a few quiet seconds before slipping under.

He remembers thinking that they sounded like raindrops. 

Now, listening to the oncoming thunderstorm pattering outside his window, he cannot help but be reminded of the soft carpet on the library floor.

How odd it is that raindrops can carry such fearful emotions.

-

“I still have another game I was in,” he finally brings up to his therapist one day.

The man opposite to him hums, showing interest.

“Would you like to talk about that then?”

Rantaro is silent for a moment before shaking his head no.

How do you talk about something you cannot remember?

-

A week later, he is discharged with a clean bill of health.

He doesn’t feel particularly sad or happy about it. In fact, he’s not sure if he feels anything about it at all.

Rantaro sighs absentmindedly as he packs his few belongings into a plain bag that the staff had provided, lingering on a plain cell phone they had given him. Stored in it are all of his contacts he’d administered to them before his memory was erased and he was put into the game, information of all the people in his life he had left behind. 

Team Danganronpa had offered him a small apartment near the outskirts of town. “A courtesy for a killing game veteran,” a man whose face Rantaro doesn’t remember had told him. Apparently he’s well liked and respected enough to be given compensation by the facilitators of the game, as well as having some hefty winnings from his previous game stashed away in his bank account. He will not be thrown out and left to fend for himself, but as he grasps uselessly for memories of people he will never remember, that is still what it feels like.

Rantaro stares at the blank cell phone, wondering who could possibly be on the contact list.

_It doesn’t matter who's on there. It’s not like I’m going to remember them._

He listens as he drops the phone into the garbage, watching the device collide with the bottom of the bin.

The sound of metal thudding onto a hard surface sounds all too familiar.

-

As he is leaving, he sees Kaede sitting in her usual spot at one of the 12 tables, her eyes glued to the TV screen once again. The bags underneath her eyes seem to grow heavier every day, and her complexion seems more pallid than usual.

“Oh. Hello Rantaro,” she murmurs faintly. Her attention is still occupied by the people on the screen. The nurses seem to be whispering excitedly. A handful of them begin to head towards another room in the wing.

“I’m going,” he says in a low voice, his hand still wrapped around the bag holding his few personal possessions. He knows she will understand. 

Kaede says nothing, just continues to watch the TV that he makes an effort to keep his gaze away from. Large bouts of noises erupt from the television speakers, a mixture of different tones of shrieks and yells, and Rantaro does not want to stick around long enough to find out the reason for them.

The blonde girl drums her fingers on the tabletop, blinking slowly as nurses begin to skirt quickly around her. Though the people around them are beginning to move at a faster pace, an eerie stillness between the two alleged students remains for several long moments as more sounds of chaos continue to emit from the TV.

“Ryoma’s gone,” she says dully, no trace of sentiment evident in her voice.

Rantaro stares, realizing what she means.

“He’s going to be waking up soon,” one of the nurses whispers in his ear. He is not sure when she got there, but her eyes are focused on the screen as well, an odd expression that Rantaro cannot quite read sprawled across her face. Maybe it’s excitement, but he hasn’t been around that enough to remember what that is again.

Again Kaede says nothing, just rests her jaw in the cup of one of her hands as she keeps her attention locked on the screen. A crash emits from the speakers, and somewhere, a nurse giggles quietly.

Rantaro responds with more silence as he makes his way out of the wing.

He knows the hospital well enough to know where the exit is.

-

“Were they ever even real?” 

Rantaro chases down one of the nurses near the exit door of the recovery facility to pose the question. They all recognize him, from this game or from the other, and he knows that all of them will be able to answer his question. And before he leaves, he has to know.

She laughs, and he cannot tell if it’s filled with pity or amusement.

“What do you think?”

-

When he leaves the hospital, Rantaro Amami knows that there is truly nothing left for him to be searching for.

Just as he steps into the real world once more, it begins to rain.

-


	2. i've been here before.

The game continues. 

He hears about it, against his will mostly, snippets of it on the news. Once, he turned on the TV to see a close up of Miu doing...something, but never got to see the rest—he hadn't kept the TV on long enough to see what was going on. 

He knows that Ryoma and Kirumi are dead. 

He does not want to know any more than that.

-

No one really gets it, least of all him. 

“I’m supposed to be dead,” he tells himself over and over again with each passing day.

The reflection in the mirror just stares back.

-

He wakes up one day with a headache.

It’s violent and painful, like his skull is splitting in two, and it takes all that he has not to scream as soon as he feels it hit him.

Rantaro rips the covers off, gritting his teeth as he stumbles over to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and tears the cap off of a bottle of painkillers. He washes it down with a swig of tap water, cold and metallic.

His forehead shines with a thin film of sweat, and he realizes just how tense his shoulders are as he clutches the sides of the sink like it’s the only thing keeping him upright (which, really, it is). He watches as the water in the sink swirls around in a lazy whirlpool, slowly idling down the pipes that moan woefully in the walls.

_Breathe,_ he thinks as his heart begins to race. He remembers the flash of metal, his eyes in her glasses.

_Breathe._

He’s not sure how much time passes until his heart returns to a steady pace. It could be seconds, it could be years, but eventually Rantaro tears his eyes away from the empty sink only to look up and be met by his own reflection again in the foggy bathroom mirror.

Suddenly he is scared all over again and he immediately panics—he knows he’s about to die because he sees the green of his eyes reflected in the glass and everything immediately goes dark as he loses his grip on the sides of the sink.

-

He wakes up on the bathroom floor hours later and knows that he is alive because the floor is cold. Not carpet, like the library was.

Death, Rantaro learned, was soft and cushioned and terrifying.

-

Tenko, Angie, and Korekiyo die.

Rantaro doesn’t know, because he doesn’t want to know.

-

He steps outside onto his small balcony one day and finds that the clouds are just as grey as ever.

Rantaro cranes his neck to take in the sky, how the shades of grey all blend and blur together, and soon enough he gets dizzy from looking at all the shadows staring back at him.

It’s cold outside, and the clouds are grey and depressing, but the sky is still clear. It’s free, uncaged, and once again Rantaro realizes, with uneasy feelings, that he is alive.

-

“You’re not supposed to be alive,” he says one day. It’s not a question, it’s more matter-of-fact, more of a statement than anything. 

The green eyed reflection doesn't reply.

-

Miu and Gonta are dead.

Rantaro doesn’t know, because he closes his eyes as he flips past the channel that he knows Danganronpa always plays on.

-

He lies down in his bed and stretches his arms out in front of him, reaching up towards the ceiling and spreading his fingers apart to get a good view of his hands.

There are no rings on them; they look bare, naked, unlike the way they were in the game. His ears maintain their piercings though, and on cold mornings like today, he can feel the chilly touch of metal pressing against the skin of his ears.

He shudders, unsure if it’s from the cold or from the storm brewing in his stomach.

-

Kokichi and Kaito are dead.

Rantaro knows, but all against his will. He’s in a cafe across the street from his small apartment complex when he sees Kaito climb out of the Exisal and sees Maki burst into tears on a TV situated on a wall next to the corner table. 

He leaves without finishing his drink.

-

Days later, he stands on his balcony again, running his hands over the metal railing that’s put in place to keep people from supposedly falling off and onto the concrete several stories below.

He flexes his hands, watching the tendons and bones underneath the skin move.

“I’m a real person,” he says out loud to himself, almost as though he is trying to convince himself of the fact.

_Am I?_

-

One day, he thinks of his sisters.

For a brief moment, he goes through all stages of grief within seconds as he realizes none of those feelings ever belonged to him. They belonged to the Rantaro Amami of Danganronpa—they belonged to the character, not the person.

He takes a slow, deep breath in and feels his lungs expand and fill with air.

“My name is Rantaro Amami,” he says to himself after he exhales, his lungs deflating like a balloon.

He pretends not to notice how shaky and unsure his voice is.

-

The game ends.

He doesn’t know how, he only knows it’s over because it’s all over every news channel. He can’t escape it, especially not here, not anywhere.

Rantaro clicks off the TV and falls back into his bed, slinging his forearm across his forehead and closing his eyes.

All he ever wanted was to end the game, and here it was, closing all on it’s own, with no real stakes in the first place.

Rantaro Amami, who he knows came out of the 52nd season alive (he knows this purely by fact and not at all by memory), did all in his power to put an end to the game. Him, with his survivors perk and extra knowledge, who knew about the secret door and who’d put his faith in no one but himself, died pitifully on a dusty carpet without even knowing that it was a hollow death.

All he had ever wanted was to get them all out alive.

Funny, he thinks, that his lack of ability to trust other people was what got him killed.

-

In the recovery center, the survivors meet the dead once again.

Someone is missing.

-

He picks up the phone as an unknown number rings—something he immediately deems a mistake as soon as he hits the answer button.

“Amami?” the voice on the other line asks. It’s an unfamiliar voice, not one that Rantaro can recall, at least not from this lifetime, and he frowns.

“Who is this?”

“This is ██████ , I’m with Team Danganron—”

He hangs up as soon as he hears the word.

-

They only call him one time after that and he barely remembers the conversation, just knows that it had something to do with a reunion that he has no desire or obligation to attend.

“They’ll miss you, you know,” a voice chirps on the other line.

He hangs up again.

_I doubt that,_ he thinks bitterly.

-

Day after day, the sky shows no signs of blue. Only the irregular grey patterns that Rantaro gets dizzy staring at show themselves.

He’s not sure how much time passes, but one day he realizes that the news no longer shoves Danganronpa: The 53rd Season down his throat, and he wonders if he can breathe easier.

-

He can’t.

Rantaro doesn’t dream at all really, and he supposes he should feel lucky about that—but the worst part about going to sleep is knowing that he is going to wake up, always met with a dull pain in his head, gasping for air that never even left him.

As soon as his body is awake, the pain is there, and he can do nothing but touch the spot on his head where it hurts, but it hurts all over, really, so the best he can do is stumble weakly out of bed and down a number of painkillers that could probably kill a horse.

He wonders if dying would be better than this.

-

He makes sure to turn all the faucets off extra tightly, paying special attention to them and always double checking to make sure they’re never dripping water.

That sound only pulls a memory of the library carpet back to his mind, forcing him to acknowledge that his final memory was the sound of blood dripping steadily from the cracks in his skull. 

Rantaro always makes sure to turn off the sink. 

-

"Where is he?" someone asks.

"He's not here.

He left, a while ago."

"Oh."

-

Sleeping becomes one of the necessary human activities that he grows to dread.

He holds his head in his hands one morning, taking slow, deep breaths, trying to feel the solid ground underneath his feet.

“I’m alive,” Rantaro tells himself out loud.

He hears the words, but they lack any sort of confidence—they’re hollow, just like he was afraid of.

He spends the day in bed fearing what could happen if he closes his eyes for a nap, wondering if he is fated to die in his sleep.

-

It seems that he can’t escape his reflection.

It’s everywhere, from the bathroom mirror to the reflective surfaces of the kitchen sink to the colors of his eyes staring back at him when he looks down into a glass of water. It’s everywhere, he’s everywhere, and he wants nothing more than to change every part of his face.

He sees his reflection in a puddle on his balcony after a day of rain, and Rantaro seizes up, preparing to feel a weight hit him on the head and crumple onto the sidewalk like a tower of cards.

Nothing ever hits him.

Nothing more than a few raindrops.

-

The rain comes again the next day.

It’s not light, but it’s not heavy either; it’s a perfect rhythmic drumming on the sides of his walls, nature’s own perfect white noise. It runs down his window and into a small pool on the sill, creating a steady dripping that, despite blending in with the flurry of raindrops around it, reverberates in Rantaro’s ears.

He doesn’t sleep that night.

-

He’s not sure why, but he goes back to the recovery facility. He’s not sure what draws him back there, he just happens to be in the neighborhood, and a couple streets down just happens to be the place where he woke up just a couple weeks ago (or at least he thinks it was weeks. Who knows, really). Maybe he’s in the area for groceries, maybe it’s guilt that’s tugging him along, but somehow he ends up right across the street from the towering white building. 

Rantaro knows that he has no place there, knows that he was never truly a part of the group in the game in the first place, knows that he never had any real influence besides being the first one to die, but his feet carry him against his will and soon he finds himself in front of the entrance door.

“Visiting someone?” the receptionist asks him good naturedly.

“Mmm,” he responds with no real answer.

She tells him where to find the contestants of the 53rd season, but he already knows. He still knows every turn and corner of these hospital walls, and as he rounds the corner at the end of a hallway with an oak coffee table tucked flush against the neatly painted wall, he bumps into a flash of white and a shock of purple.

“Ah I’m sorr—oh, hello Ouma.”

It’s not rude, but it’s not exactly filled with excitement either. It’s polite, but it’s so dishearteningly neutral, and Rantaro wishes he could fill his words with something more interesting.

He remembers only interacting with Kokichi a small handful of times in the game, and out of the rest of the cast, Rantaro seemed to be one of the few that could more or less tolerate his strong personality. They hadn't been necessarily close (he hadn’t been alive long enough to grow close to anyone, really), but Rantaro seemed to be one of the few people that didn’t outright hate the smaller boy upon their first interaction.

But that was then and this is now, and right now, Rantaro stands facing the other boy at an intersection of two hallways, neither one speaking for a couple seconds.

Kokichi’s eyes narrow, and Rantaro’s eyebrows raise slightly in response.

“You weren’t here when the rest of us woke up.”

It’s laced with a bitterness he wasn’t expecting from the other party, one he hadn’t experienced firsthand for himself in the game after dying so early on. Rantaro’s eyebrows climb higher in apparent surprise.

“Oh. Um. Yeah…”

An awkward silence hangs between them. Rantaro expects Kokichi to say something absurd, followed by “that was a lie!” or even burst out laughing and say something like “you should see your face right now!” but all that remains is a hardened expression that Rantaro cannot read.

“I’m glad you made it out okay,” Rantaro says halfheartedly, unsure where the conversation is going. Truthfully, he’s not sure he wants it to go anywhere at all. 

Kokichi blinks, and Rantaro notices. There is something missing. Something is not quite there. 

“Yeah,” he responds shortly, his eyes fixed in a direction that gears more towards Rantaro’s shoes than his face. They are flat, emotionless, like one of Angie’s blank notebook pages before she fills it with color (or rather, her programmed persona would). He expects Kokichi to elaborate, to say more, but he is met with a stark uncharacteristic silence that he quickly understands is here to stay.

Rantaro stares, trying to fill the space in front of his eyes, and Kokichi does not meet them. 

Something is missing. 

Something, he realizes over and over again, is not quite there. 

-

He buys a deck of cards one day.

It’s impulsive; a quick buy at some nameless supermarket he happened to stop at for a drink or two. As he shuffles the deck, he feels how smooth and shiny they are in his hands and takes small pleasure in owning something new.

The Joker card is not used in solitaire, so he places it off to the side; it is but a spectator, a viewer of its companions in a game played for the contentment of one person. 

Rantaro plays solitaire alone in his apartment, relishing the glossy finish underneath his thumbs.

-

He lies in bed one night with all of the lights off, his room pitch black. 

He listens to his heartbeat thump steadily in his chest, counting each beat to make sure it is even. 

Even though he may be breathing, Rantaro doubts that he is truly alive.

He doesn’t think he’s ever been, not since giving himself up to them, and he wonders if it’s possible to mourn a past that you do not remember.

-

_Who am I?_ he asks himself one day.

Rantaro doesn't know.

-

He’s not sure why he goes back a second time.

Kokichi sits at a table in the common area, away from all the others. (Not like there are many other people in the common area anyway—Ryoma is staring aimlessly out the window and Angie is staring blankly at her empty notepad in the corner of the room.) He seems preoccupied in a card game, most likely a one-player game judging from the lack of players. 

When Rantaro sits across him to him, he briefly looks up, dark circles hugging the underside of his eyes. The dark haired boy clutches his cards a little tighter, turning his head downwards again and focusing intently on the remaining ones he has laid out in front of him in a neat and orderly arrangement. 

“Why are _you_ here?” He almost spits out his words, harsh and defensive, like the other boy is a walking threat who has come to take him away.

“I…ah.”

Rantaro does not know what to say, because just as fate continually allows, Rantaro doesn’t have an answer. 

-

He places a metal ring on his finger and begins to twist it absentmindedly, feeling the smooth surface slide effortlessly against his skin. 

It’s cold.

So cold. A familiar kind of cold, something he feels he has known before.

A quick gleam of metal flickers in the back of his mind. 

He rips it off his finger and discards it in a drawer.

-

He wakes up with another headache as usual, but this one is worse than usual; it chains him to his bed and bashes his skull in with a hammer.

When he tries to push himself up to sit upright, the world begins to spin and he falls back onto his pillow with a sharp gasp as his vision immediately clouds up with black spots. His breath rattles around in his chest, trembling and burdened with fear, and he does everything he can to make sure that he keeps filling his lungs with air no matter how intense the hurt may be.

Rantaro is rendered helpless for several hours as he lays in bed immobile, head throbbing with pain worsening every minute, and in the back of his mind he wishes even more that he really was dead if it meant ending the pain that plagued him so brutally in the mornings.

He thinks he feels blood running down the side of his face, but when he raises a shaky hand to check, his fingertips come back cold and dry.

-

He isn’t sure why he keeps going back to the hospital, just that he doesn’t stop.

He knows that nobody really wants him there; there’s no logical reason to keep going, but once again he enters the automatic doors, climbs a few flights of stairs, makes several turns around several hallways, and finds himself in an almost-empty common area.

Angie passes by him and he hardly recognizes her; he only knows that it is her from her bright shock of hair that now hangs in one long, unkempt white curtain down her back.

She shuffles past him without even an acknowledgement, her eyes glassy, her hand loosely gripping a notepad with nothing written on it.

Rantaro watches silently as she goes, wondering if he should have said something.

-

He finds out how Kokichi died.

“Oh it was so gruesome,” one of the nurses whispers as she signs him into the visitors log. Despite her gory description of what had happened, Rantaro can’t help but notice the way her eyes light up while she speaks, how the corners of her mouth curl upwards as she describes the sadness of the 5th trial and how painful it must have been to have been crushed alive.

Rantaro wonders in fear if the students in recovery have the right people caring for them.

-

He doesn’t go outside much.

His days mostly consist of waking up with a raging headache, taking one too many painkillers, and slowly shuffling through his bare apartment doing nothing in particular.

Most of the time he had kept the TV off in an effort to avoid accidentally flipping to a channel with the 53rd season playing on it, but now that that’s over, Rantaro sits on his couch drumming his fingers on the coffee table, staring at the TV remote.

_Should I?_

_Is it safe?_

He decides no, better not risk it.

He submits to cleaning his already spotless apartment for the fourth time this week.

-

Isolation, Rantaro finds, is forlorn and quiet.

When he scrapes the leg of his chair against the floor, it fills the room. When he places a cup down on the countertop, the clink resonates in his ears. The gusts of wind outside shake his whole building, and he swears he can hear the walls breathing.

Has life always been this loud?

\- 

“Can I sit here?”

Kokichi looks up from his cards, apparently completely unfazed by Rantaro’s sudden appearance in front of him.

“Do I look like your mother? I’m not gonna tell you what to do.”

He takes this as a halfhearted okay as he pulls the flimsy plastic chair out from its place underneath the table and sits down, placing his arms on the rests on either side of him.

Kokichi says nothing as he turns his attention back to the single-player card game in front of him.

Rantaro notices the two Joker cards placed off to the side.

“Solitaire?”

The small boy’s eyes flicker up momentarily and there’s an apprehensive feel to them, almost surveying Rantaro for any signs of danger he may pose.

“Yeah.”

He keeps his answers short and turns back to his game.

They don’t say anything for several minutes as Rantaro watches in vague interest as Kokichi sets his cards down in their neat piles, grouping them accordingly.

“You mind if I join?”

Rantaro isn’t quite sure why he says it—he knows it’s not his place, he barely knows the other boy, but the words leave him without thinking and soon enough he curses himself for making such a rash move.

“...Fine.”

It’s an unexpected answer for sure, and Kokichi doesn’t look up from the table, just gathers all the cards he’d laid out on it and begins shuffling. Rantaro is briefly stunned, but is soon met with an awaiting look from the other party.

“So are you gonna get the other deck or what?”

They begin a game of double solitaire.

Rantaro, to his own surprise, wins.

-

That day Rantaro leaves the hospital feeling heavier than usual.

He isn’t sure why, he just knows that as soon as he steps out of the doors to the hospital, the air outside feels suffocating and an unseen pressure knots itself in his chest.

His head begins to feel light yet burdensome, like it’s about to pop off at any moment, and he pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to bring himself back to the ground.

Rantaro walks home, the dizzying feeling not leaving until he has to go to sleep that night.

(He wakes up with another headache, just like he always does.)

-

Isolation is silent, and that silence is heavy and stifling.

Every quiet minute is asphyxiating and drowns him in the nothingness that is apparently so abundant in his small, empty apartment. Noiselessness allows his mind to wander, and when it does, all he sees is a flash of bright white light that leaves him blinking colors out of his eyes.

In a time of weakness, desperate to escape the silence, Rantaro feels the TV remote in his hands and clicks the power button.

The TV turns on.

He is not met with bright pink blood or a black and white bear or a trial room.

Just the weather. 

-

_Who am I supposed to be?_

Rantaro stands on his balcony, idly tracing his thumb along the metal railing.

_You're Rantaro Amami,_ a voice in his brain tells him.

_Yeah, but,_

_Who is that, really?_

-

“Why did you do it?”

The two boys sit across from each other, cards in each other their hands. Neither of them had said anything during the entirety of their time together; Rantaro had simply sat down with him, added another deck, and without speaking, the two had begun a round of double solitaire.

Kokichi raises his eyes, narrowed with suspicion.

“Do what?”

Rantaro raises his eyebrows, his eyes questioning.

“You know...die.”

Kokichi’s face goes blank, something Rantaro had learned was a more common expression on his features rather than the constant dynamic ones he’d utilized during his garish game persona. He holds his cards tightly, as if an unexpected gust of wind may come and carry them away like loose leaves in autumn, and he stares directly into Rantaro’s eyes as his mouth flattens into a line.

“That isn’t really any of your business, is it?”

They say nothing after that.

-

Rantaro realizes one day that he doesn’t know any of them died.

He’d learned about Kokichi purely by chance; all the others were a mystery.

As he strolls absentmindedly down a hallway one day, he is caught off guard by a figure standing at the end of it.

It’s small and frail, but it’s standing up straight and sports disheveled blue hair and prominent bags under the eyes, and it takes some time for Ramtaro to realize that he is looking at Shuichi.

They stare at each other for several uncomfortably long moments and Rantaro’s blood runs cold; silence seems to be commonplace with him and he wishes desperately that he could say something, anything, to fill the space between.

Shuichi answers with his own heavy silence as he pivots around in one unsteady movement, turning towards the corner and walking in small, uneven steps until he is out of sight.

And then he is gone, leaving Rantaro wondering if he was ever there in the first place.

-

When he walks home in the rain, Rantaro layers from head to toe, covering his head with the hood from his waterproof windbreaker, holding an umbrella over his head, not an inch of skin showing.

He walks quickly, skirting around faceless people walking down the sidewalk, his heart hammering faster the more he listens to the sound of raindrops beating his umbrella like a drum.

And then, a large drop of water or two hits his forehead.

He flinches, dropping his umbrella into a puddle of muddy water, and without a second thought, bolts without picking it up.

“Hey, wait!” he hears a voice cry out, presumably to return his fallen umbrella, but Rantaro just shoves his hands into his coat and runs.

He runs, like he has any chance of outrunning the rain that completely and entirely surrounds him. He runs, without even knowing where he’s gone or where he’s going, until somehow he ends up at the door to his apartment building which he rips open with such force that it slams against the wall.

As soon as he’s inside, he stumbles over to a potted plant, nearly slipping on the wet floor, and immediately dry heaves into the earthy soil.

Rantaro doesn’t like the rain.

Not anymore, at least.

-

During one of his impulsive visits to the recovery center, he walks by one of the many closed doors that hold one of his “classmates”—more accurately, one of the many strangers he does not know. 

He thinks he hears crying. 

It’s high pitched, most likely a girl’s, although he cannot say for sure who the voice belongs to. The cold, clear sound rings out like a wounded animal, and for a split second Rantaro stops, halting his next step in the middle of the pristine white hallway, straining his ears to see if he’s hearing correctly. 

A beat of silence.

Or maybe—

_No_ , Rantaro thinks. _It’s not any of my business._

He keeps on walking. 

-

And then one day, Rantaro cries. 

It’s quiet and mundane, not a large scale outburst like the one thinks he heard while walking the lonely halls of a full hospital, although perhaps a part of him wishes it was. It would mean feeling something “out of character,” anyway, whoever that may be. 

He watches himself in the mirror as a few silent tears dot his cheeks, feeling more like a simple observer of the weeping reflection in front of him rather than a person in the real world, crying. 

_What am I even crying about?_ he asks himself as another tear trails down his face.

The lights in the bathroom harshly illuminate his features, forming shadows around the curves of his jaw and accentuating the heavy darkness underneath his eyes. As he forces himself to stare at his own image in the slightly dirty glass, he braces himself for the sound of a crack against his skull. 

For a stagnant ten minutes, Rantaro’s reflection cries soundlessly in the mirror, not quite knowing why. 

(It’s not like he has anything or anyone to mourn anyway.)

He keeps the lights off in the bathroom after that. 

-

“Why don’t you talk to the others?”

Rantaro poses the question to Kokichi one day during an otherwise silent game of chess. The taller boy is winning, and is on track to capture the other’s queen.

Kokichi crosses his arms, narrowing his eyes the way that he always seems to do everytime Rantaro asks him any question at all. He’s suspicious and untrusting, and Rantaro has wondered more than once if he has always been this way.

“Why don’t _you?_ ”

Rantaro folds his arms and places them on the table in front of him, calculating which moves his rook and pawn need to take to overwhelm Kokichi’s queen.

“Dunno. Not really my place.”

“Well then what makes you think it’s mine?”

He always answers a question with a question. Rantaro frowns, zeroing in on his rook. Two or three moves and he’d easily take out one of Kokichi’s most valuable assets.

“Well you were with them for longer,” he says as he moves his piece along half the length of the board.

Kokichi doesn’t even think, just moves a pawn without even a second glance at the board.

“I’d think you’d all...you know, join together or something,” Rantaro discloses. He’s not bitter, not at all, because to be bitter you’d actually have to know the other people and be somewhat close to them in order to even feel left out.

He’s...he’s not sure what he’s feeling, really.

The other boy lets out an unfeeling laugh as he absentmindedly shoves another pawn forward, his eyes barely on the board. With that easy opening, Rantaro blinks, and slowly moves his rook to overtake Kokichi’s queen.

“You flatter me, Amami.”

It’s cold and flat. Not genuine in the slightest.

-

A week later, they sit across from each other again, neither one saying anything for a long time while the chessboard wears a jumble of black and white, intermingling with each other in a fusion of what would be a fusion of a calming slate grey. 

Rantaro watches as his queen and last remaining bishop back Kokichi’s king into a corner. A clean checkmate, and not a single word or playful verbal jab from the other party. Rantaro looks up, his face impassive as neither of them acknowledge his victory. 

“You’re different.”

Kokichi stares, violet eyes empty and vacant. 

“So are you.”

-

When he falls asleep, Rantaro is still not quite sure if he is dreaming. 

His hands materialize in front of him, and realizes he is floating in an empty space, no ground underneath his feet, no rails to hold onto. 

He thinks he should be scared, but he finds that he has never felt more at peace than when he is surrounded by nothing. 

_There’s nothing here_ , he thinks to himself, but as soon as the thought enters his brain, he realizes that could not be further from the truth. Lines begin to climb up and down the white space around him, like lineart on a canvas, and he watches with vague interest as they begin to connect like branches, forming various shapes and outlines.

Soon after, color begins to swim within the outlines, like a world being painted. They seem to be different shades of brown, ranging from light chestnut to deep mahogany, and they climb upwards and color in the boxy towers that have taken shape all around him. Soon after, other small splotches of colors appear; smaller boxes of crimson and moss and other broody, muted colors that remind him of dark fairytale movies begin to take their places inside of the parts of the towers that seem to be caved in, placing themselves in neat, orderly rows.

Rantaro blinks, realizing he is standing on a ground he does not remember being there, and just like that, the world around him is solidified.

In front of him, a recognizable image begins to take place. It’s different from the scene around him—out of place, unusual. His brows begin to knit together as they usually do when he falls into deep concentration while he tries to put a name to it. 

_Door._

It’s black and white with a single red emblem on one side, and Rantaro is suddenly aware of his fingers curling around a rectangular object that weighs down his hand. He pulls it up to his eyes and is met with his own face reflected in a blank screen of a tablet he feels like he has definitely seen before.

The still-confused boy lifts his head to the black and white door just as a flash of light distracts him, and he becomes all too aware of an odd rumbling sound that makes what he now realizes are books shiver in anticipation.

Rantaro squints, trying to focus, trying to blink the light out of his eyes.

He takes a step forward. A small memory in the back of his mind flickers as he does.

Whether or not the world goes bright or dark, Rantaro Amami is still not quite sure.

_Oh_ , he thinks to himself as the bookcase behind him begins to tremble.

_I’ve been here before._

-


	3. anywhere but here.

He decides, one day, that he cannot stay here. 

One morning his head throbs, and he knows he has to leave. 

-

“I’m going,” Rantaro says one day.

Kokichi keeps his eyes on the cards in front of him.

“Where?”

Rantaro shrugs.

“Anywhere but here.”

Kokichi closes his eyes and Rantaro notices how tired he looks.

“That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it? Running away?”

It’s spiteful and annoyed, but Rantaro knows it’s true. Kokichi may not be the same person he was in the game anymore, but he could still read people, and if there was anything Rantaro hated, it was being read like an open book. 

He says nothing as he puts down another card.

-

He traces the curve of his jaw as he stands in his bathroom, dark and unlit.

His fingertips trail up the side of his face and up to the side of his head, the center point of the pain that came so often to him every morning. 

Aside from the hair growing over it, it’s smooth, not cracked or dented in. 

He lets out a breath he didn’t realize he had been holding. 

-

“Where are you going to go?”

The question is unprompted, as most conversations are between the two of them, but the surprising part about it is that Kokichi is the one to speak first for once.

Rantaro puts down his card, a two of spades.

“I’m not sure.”

Kokichi pauses, as if he is considering his next move, then slowly puts his entire hand of cards down in front of him before raising his head to meet Rantaro’s eye.

“You don’t really think ahead, do you Amami?”

The jab is sharp and unkind, almost condescending. Rantaro’s breath hitches, and for a moment he is back on the library floor, back to staring at his own reflection in the glasses of someone he still can’t put a face to, back to a white flash of light that still flickers in the back of his eyes every time he wakes up.

He throws his cards down and leaves without another word.

Kokichi silently watches him storm away and does nothing to stop him.

-

_Where are you going to go?_

_I don’t know._

_Anywhere but here,_ he decides again as he starts shoving his clothes into a suitcase in a manic frenzy. He doesn’t have too many things to begin with, so he should be done packing at some point.

Soon.

Hopefully.

(Maybe.)

-

The sky is clear today.

Rantaro thanks whatever God is out there.

-

He makes himself a cup of tea, watching the light gold color spread lazily out in the plain mug.

He decides not to go to the hospital today.

As he goes to take a sip, Rantaro catches a flash of green eyes reflected in the liquid of his cup and suddenly he gasps for air, dropping the mug and hearing porcelain pieces shatter on the tiled floor.

The crash of something breaking yanks Rantaro back to reality, and he stares at his empty hands, slightly disoriented, until he realizes he is standing in a puddle.

_Fuck,_ he thinks to himself. _God, Fuck._

When he goes to pick up the fractured pieces in the puddle of tea on his kitchen floor, Rantaro nicks his fingertip on a rather sharp fragment of the broken mug and quickly retracts his hand away from it as soon as the pain registers.

He sees a thin drop of blood blossom on the tip of his finger.

It’s a deep, rich red, not like the bright and shocking Danganronpa pink that matted his hair and drowned him in raindrops before waking up in a hospital bed, knowing he should be dead.

Rantaro stares as the bead of blood begins to trail down his finger and does nothing to stop it.

-

Rantaro doesn’t come to visit him for several days.

Kokichi plays solitaire in an empty common room again.

He wishes the nurses would let him take the cards into his room, but unfortunately things never go his way.

Not anymore, anyway.

(Maybe not ever.)

-

“Hey.”

And then he’s back, standing there, looking down at Kokichi as he places down an 8 of hearts.

He’s completely unphased as the taller boy’s eyes are on him, just examines his several piles along the table.

“Ah...do you want—”

“Are you gonna play or what?”

It’s a bit snappy, but it’s not angry or upset, and Rantaro pulls the chair out opposite to him and places a second deck on the table.

He shuffles the deck and slowly starts distributing cards out in a line, creating the Table.

“You were gone an awful long time, weren’t you?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

He doesn’t offer any further explanation, and Kokichi doesn’t ask.

They finish the game in silence.

(Rantaro wins, as usual.)

-

“Do you want to play chess?”

A heavy beat of silence.

“No...no. I don’t.”

_Not anymore_ , Kokichi thinks to himself.

-

His walk home from the hospital begins at sunset today.

It’s beautiful, actually; the leaves are beginning to turn bright shades of yellow and orange, engulfing the streets around him with colors plucked from a picture book. They mingle with the rich sunlight that drapes itself across the asphalt, painting the world in reds and golds, and for a moment the world around him melts into the rich honey you only ever find at fancy cafés. 

(For that one moment, he thinks that maybe he really is alive.)

The air is crisp. Cool. Refreshing and sharp and definitely there.

That evening, Rantaro decides that he likes autumn.

\- 

“I didn’t trust them,” he tells Kokichi days later over another game of double solitaire.

Kokichi leans back in his chair, his expression uninterested as his eyes scan over his hand of cards.

“Is this gonna be a sob story or something? Cause I’m not really interested in hearing it.”

Rantaro takes a deep breath and exhales as he cranes his head back and closes his eyes, his subconscious trying to make sure there is air in his lungs.

“No. Nothing like that.”

He stops it at that.

They finish the game in silence.

(Rantaro wins.)

-

As Rantaro signs out from the visitors log, he feels Kokichi’s eyes burning into his back.

He turns around, and he is right; the boy is still sitting at the table where Rantaro left him, focusing intently on the back of his head.

Rantaro gives a small wave, but is met only with a blank expression that he has learned, by now, is impossible to decipher.

Blinking twice, Rantaro shakes the unnerving feeling spreading through his veins and heads towards the hallway that he knows he has to go down, turn left, then turn right, then go left again, down a few flights of stairs, and he’ll be in the lobby.

“Amami.”

He turns his head, almost a little bit too fast.

Kokichi’s arms are folded across his chest, his eyes filled with an intensity that Rantaro does not think he’s ever seen before. He can’t tell what it means or what it’s supposed to be telling him, but he knows that it’s there.

“For what it’s worth,”

Kokichi pauses; Rantaro is not sure if he is hesitating or if he is pondering the weight of his words.

“That makes two of us.”

-

He wants to leave.

_“That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it? Running away?”_

He still wants to leave.

_“You don’t really think ahead, do you Amami?”_

The last time he’d tried to run away, he’d ended up dead on the floor of a library.

The last time he didn’t think ahead, he’d ended up blinded by a flash of white light and staring into his own eyes before ending up dead on the floor of a library.

_Ouma is right,_ he thinks to himself logically.

_So why_

_Do I still want to leave?_

-

The skies begin to cloud over.

Rantaro braces himself.

-

“You’re not supposed to be alive,” he whispers to himself again as he lays in bed with the lights off, waiting to fall asleep. 

The darkness around him is heavy and stifling and hugs him like old carpet.

_You should be dead,_ he reminds himself, not for the first time this week. 

_Yeah…I know._

-

“Why did you tell me that?”

Kokichi just hums in response, placing down a card. 6 of hearts.

“Ouma.”

Kokichi just looks up questioningly, eyebrows arched in feigned surprise.

“Tell you what?”

Rantaro frowns.

“‘That makes two of us.’ What is that supposed to mean?”

The corners of Kokichi’s mouth twitch just slightly.

“It’s your turn, Amami.”

“Ouma what did you mean by that.”

It’s more of a demand than a question, and even Kokichi is caught off guard by the roughness of his tone.

“Gee Amami I don’t remember you being this assertive! It’s almost—”

“I’m not gonna ask you again—”

“Then don’t.”

Rantaro stops as he sees an odd smile sprawl across Kokichi’s gaunt features, his eyes brimming with something foreign, and he watches as the smaller boy places his cards down and laces all but his index fingers together, forming a gun with his hand and pressing it to the bottom of his chin as he rests his head on the tip of it.

A realization dawns on him as he watches Kokichi’s large eyes watch him expectedly, almost as though he’s waiting for something.

“You’re messing with me right now, around you?”

Kokichi cackles gleefully, a sound Rantaro hardly even remembers from when he was “alive” for such a short time, and it echoes within the walls of the empty hospital common room.

Rantaro blinks once in disbelief and places down his next card.

(He ends up winning again.)

-

He knows he should be grateful for his second chance at life, but he is anything but.

He’s filled with anger and sadness and hate and even though he is alive, a part of him still grieves for the part of him that died,

cushioned by old carpet with blood dripping out of his head.

A part of him wishes it was real, that they simply left him there on the library floor and let his body decompose in that very spot until he was nothing left but a pile of bones, eternally reading the thousands of books on the shelves.

But every time he wishes for that, guilt floods him like a river during a typhoon, because even though he knows he should be relieved, that’s just not the case. 

_Why do you insist on feeling resentment towards feeling alive?_ He asks himself as he stares at the ceiling, dreading sleep.

_I should be happy, right?_

_-_

Rantaro is not sure how his mind wanders to the first game he was in, the one he cannot recall anything from.

_When I signed the contract for that game, I signed my life away,_ he thinks dully as he stands on his balcony again. The metal railing chills the palms of his hands, and the ground beneath him is dry.

He doesn't remember anything at all from that game, except for one feeling that he cannot shake that he suspects comes from his experiences that he isn't able to recall.

Sadness.

-

“Ouma,” he finds himself saying one day.

The boy across him shifts his eyes up from his piles of cards in front of him, but keeps his head turned down towards the table.

“You...shouldn’t have had to die like that.”

He’s not sure what he’s saying or why he’s saying it—honestly, he didn’t really think about it beforehand, the words just kind of leave him without thinking, and now that they’re out there Rantaro immediately feels regret.

Kokichi narrows his eyes, anger immediately becoming eminent in his features, and he slowly leans forward as though he doesn’t want the nonexistent people around them to hear what he’s about to say.

“Don’t act like you know what’s best for me,” he says, almost snarling. 

“It seems like you don’t even know what you’re supposed to be doing either, so don’t act like you’re gonna say some inspirational shit to me one day and it'll suddenly be like like nothing ever happened.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Get out.”

So he does.

-

He doesn’t go back for a while.

The common room is empty.

-

Rantaro steeps his tea, trying not to glance at the murky liquid for too long (he only buys dark colored tea after the incident with the other one).

The sky outside is grey, just like it almost always is.

Time, it seems, often stood still for him whenever he was anywhere but the hospital. Even now, he felt as though he’d been standing in the same spot for hours, or that the sun hadn’t moved a single inch in days.

Nothing ever moved, nothing ever changed, and he supposes he’s no exception.

Rantaro sits down at the small kitchen table and begins a game of solitaire.

The Joker card sits alone, forgotten.

-

Isolation is easy when you’ve done it for so long, he decides.

Even though he knows that solitaire is a one player game, he cannot help but feel lonely.

-

He knows he wasn’t there when any of them woke up, save for Kaede, but he hadn’t stayed long enough to really talk to her much.

He wonders if the others woke up screaming and terrified or if they woke up silent and petrified.

(He isn’t sure which is worse.)

One night, while he is procrastinating falling asleep, Rantaro wonders how Kokichi woke up, how he must have reacted to the news that he was alive.

He ignores the fact that he probably knows already.

-

It’s dark.

_“You weren’t here when the rest of us woke up.”_

_“You weren’t here when the rest of us woke up.”_

_“You weren’t here when the rest of us woke up.”_

_“You weren’t here when the rest of us woke up.”_

_“You weren’t ḣ̶̤e̸̖̒r̶̹̿e̵̟͌ when the rest of us woke up.”_

_“̴Y̶o̶u̷ ̶w̶e̸r̴e̷n̸’̵t̸ ̴h̸e̴r̶e̷ ̵w̷h̶e̷n̸ ̴t̶h̸e̵ ̵r̵e̷s̸t̶ ̷o̶f̵ ̸u̵s̵ ̵w̸o̵k̴e̷ ̴u̵p̷.̷”̸_

**_̴“̴Y̵o̴u̸ ̶w̵e̸r̵e̴n̶’̶t̸ ̴h̴e̵r̸e̷.̶”̶_ **

“Where were you?”

Rantaro shoots up out of bed gasping for air, his headache worsened by the ringing in his ears.

-

_Where were you?_

-

He decides he has to go back.

When he climbs the stairs and makes several turns around several hallways, he is met with an empty common room and a single nurse chatting noisily on the phone.

He catches her eye, and she gives a small wave of acknowledgement as she keeps her conversation going, but nothing more than that.

Maybe he shouldn’t be here (no, he knows he shouldn’t, he already knows he has no place here), but every part of him wants to stay.

The common room is empty but all the doors have nameplates, and it doesn’t take him long to find the one he wants. He knocks gently on the door, hesitating for a moment.

It’s ripped open with such force that Rantaro almost tumbles backwards.

“What? I already told you I didn’t ta—Oh.”

Oh.

He’s met with a visibly annoyed Kokichi, who quickly turns into a blank slate as soon as he sees Rantaro. He stands in the doorway, still clutching the door handle, and stares Rantaro right in the face with eyes that have always been impossible to read.

“Why are you here?”

Maybe he shouldn’t have come.

“I, ah, brought my deck,” he hears himself saying, and he wishes now more than ever that he would shut up.

Kokichi blinks, face completely empty, trying to understand. Then he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and steps over the doorway that stands between him and Rantaro and quietly closes the door behind him.

“Let’s play then.”

-

“You shouldn’t have said that,” he hears one day as he’s on his way out.

Rantaro turns, the voice far deeper than the one that belonged to the boy he’d been playing double solitaire with over the last few hours, and he sees Ryoma sitting by a window, a dull pencil and some sort of workbook dangled over his legs.

“Sorry?”

“You shouldn’t have said that thing to him a few weeks ago,” Ryoma repeats, his eyes facing downwards towards the small workbook.

“None of us want to think about that,” he explains as he writes something down.

Then, he looks up, and Rantaro sees just how tired he is. The bags underneath his eyes are the worst he’s ever seen, and his face seems so thin that Rantaro can almost see his cheekbones jutting out of his small face.

“You don’t either, do you?”

-

As goes to sleep that night, he sees a bright flash of white light.

He expects to be met with a thud in his skull and unbearable pain spreading down to his neck, but instead there is nothing, and again he’s floating in a white space filled with nothing.

_I’ve...been here...before...right…?_

He reaches out to nothing at all and is also met with nothing, and Rantaro wonders if he’s forever meant to be stuck in an endless loop of nothingness his entire life.

He wakes up before any lines begin to form or any colors start to consume the world around him.

(The pain still meets him in the end, though.)

-

He sees a picture of Tsumugi on some magazine on the shelf of a convenience store that he happens to be in one day.

Rantaro knows that he was in the 53rd game with her, knows that they probably interacted a bit, but as he stares at the magazine from afar, he squints his eyes, the deep blue shade of her hair wrapping itself around his neck.

He thinks he knows her from somewhere.

-

They’re playing another game of solitaire again.

There’s no tension anymore, like the event from weeks ago never happened. It’s as if it all dissolved into the playing cards and has been all forgotten.

And then he tries it again, one day.

“You’re important you know,” he blurts out without thinking, and immediately he feels regret digging it’s restless teeth into his stomach and he internally braces himself to be on the receiving end of another resentful outburst.

But the boy across from him frowns—it’s not angry or confused or upset, it’s more contemplative, like he’s weighing the statement on a scale in his mind, holding each and every letter in the palm of his hand. He isn’t hostile or spiteful; he’s as indecipherable as always, and a heavy silence lingers between the two of them for a long, agonizing moment before Kokichi speaks in a small, eerily neutral voice.

“Was I though?”

Rantaro cannot help but wonder the same thing for himself.

-


	4. going.

And then one day, he knows for sure that he has to leave.

He’s not sure why he knows for sure today of all days, but today is the day he decides for sure that he is leaving.

It’s not like anything significant happened today, but today is when Rantaro realizes that he has to go. He has to go somewhere, anywhere, anywhere but here, because here there is nothing and there will always be nothing.

His bags are already half packed, anyway.

-

“You’re not supposed to be alive,” he reminds himself again.

He stares at the shadow in the mirror in the dark bathroom and it stares back, bright green and silent.

-

“Amami,”

He lifts his attention from the spread of cards on the table. He’s winning, again—in fact, Rantaro hasn’t lost a single game to Kokichi, and a part of him wholeheartedly believes that he is throwing every game. Why he is, Rantaro doesn’t know. He doubts he ever will.

“Yeah?”

The small boy raises his eyes up from his own hand of cards and meets him with another cryptic look on his face that Rantaro doesn’t think he’ll ever understand.

“You asked me why I died.”

Rantaro blinks in return, half curious and half terrified.

“It was the same reason you did.”

He says nothing after that and places another card down.

Rantaro doesn’t question, just follows suit and continues the game.

-

As he wakes up in the middle of a rather cold night with the usual pain on the side of his head, Rantaro expects to see light flash in the back of his eyelids, but tonight he doesn't.

_Blue_.

-

_How do you get over dying?_

Rantaro Amami still does not know.

He doesn’t think he ever will.

-

His apartment is emptier than ever, with almost all of his small amounts of clothes thrown into his suitcase and duffel bag, and Rantaro knows that he wants to leave.

_“That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it? Running away?”_

_Maybe, yeah,_ he thinks sadly to himself. But it’s all he knows how to do, it’s all that the character of Rantaro Amami knows, and maybe he didn’t have an ultimate talent or the affirmation of a prestigious academy, but the traces that they left of him still know that running away is what he did best.

Because as long as you’re running, as long as you’re moving, you’re eventually going to end up somewhere other than here, and what Rantaro wants more than anything is to be anywhere but here in his barren apartment that was given to him by the same people who ruined every part of him. As long as he is running, he’s bound to come across something new that gives him something else, something more than what he has right now.

But while the comforting embrace of the unknown calls out to him, there are more card games to play, games that Rantaro might even end up losing—and sure he wants to run away, but he wants to lose a game of double solitaire just once before he does.

He decides he’ll leave next week.

_-_

_Blue._

_Green._

They bow to each other on the back of his eyelids, moving in tandem like two slow dancers, and he swears that he has seen them together before.

-

“I’m going,” he says again.

Kokichi slowly places a card down on one of the piles, blinking twice.

“I know.”

Rantaro looks down at his hand. He knows he’s going to win, but he so badly wishes he wouldn’t.

“Hey, Ouma?”

“Yeah?”

“Why don’t you ever let yourself win?”

Kokichi lays his right hand down on the table and taps it methodically with his fingertips as he stares at the cards laid out in columns on the surface of the weathered wood.

“Why don’t you ever lose? It’s not my fault you’re such a master at double solitaire.”

“I know you’re letting me win. Why?”

“Cause I feel sorry for you!”

He doesn’t buy that for a second.

“Ouma, tell me.” He pauses for a moment. “Please.”

Kokichi squints his eyes as he surveys the cards already laid out in front of him.

“Because winning every time would be boring, wouldn’t it? It’s waaaay more fun to see how many ways you can lose instead of how many times you can win. Don’t you think?”

-

Rantaro knows that he has to leave.

He has nothing keeping him here. His apartment is empty, his old memories are dead, and all of his sisters would be too if they were ever even alive in the first place.

(He knows they weren’t.)

There’s nothing else binding him to this place except maybe guilt and grief, but he knows he has to shake that sometime.

_So why_

_Am I waiting?_

-

He wins again next week.

Rantaro laces his hands together and traces circles on his skin with his thumb. If he had rings, he would toy with them, but all of his rings are tucked away in a drawer that he hasn’t opened in weeks, maybe even months. He is not bringing them with him.

“I’m going,” he repeats for the third time.

Kokichi just shuffles the cards again. Rantaro appreciates the white noise of the cards moving at a rapid pace.

“I know that. You’ve told me already.”

“I just thought you should know again.”

“Okay thanks for the reminder,” Kokichi snorts sarcastically as he bridges the cards, and Rantaro closes his eyes as he listens to the cards all flap together into one solid pile.

“I’m leaving next week.”

Kokichi just keeps shuffling the cards, focused on the task at hand.

“Cool. Don’t let yourself get mugged or hit by a plane or anything.”

Rantaro taps his thumb against his skin.

“I won't,” he says, and it’s so soft that both of them barely hear it.

Kokichi just sets the deck down in the middle of the table in a soft thud.

“Another game?”

_Sure,_ Rantaro thinks as he silently reaches out to the cards.

-

And then he loses.

He actually loses.

Rantaro loses, but he sees this as a small triumph.

Kokichi places his elbows on the table and places his chin on top of both of his fists, an outlandish smile plastered onto his gaunt face as his eyes fill with something that looks a lot like lunacy.

“See? Wasn’t that way more fun?”

-

He loses a game, which means Rantaro has to go.

He knows he has to leave now. The silent promise he made to himself has been fulfilled, so now he has no choice but to go.

Even though a part of him hesitates.

-

The headaches become unbearable. 

He keeps the painkillers on his bedside table, taking them almost every hour to quell the insufferable pain that invites itself into his head.

On a day where he stumbles into the bathroom after taking several pills, he splashes water onto his face and looks up to see himself in the mirror smeared with old water marks and a couple fingerprints.

For a split second, he swears that he sees a vibrant hue of pink running down the side of his head and he grips the sides of the sink for support as all breath leaves his body.

Though it was only just his overactive imagination, it terrifies him nonetheless, and Rantaro bolts from the bathroom and collapses clumsily onto the bed like a marionette cut from it’s strings.

_Maybe leaving is for the best_.

-

And then one day, he knows.

Blue and green waltz hand in hand, and soon Rantaro understands.

As soon as he realizes, he expects some sort of closure, to finally feel a sense of completeness after figuring out what happened to him that night in the library.

But all that he feels is a heavy desolation that only draws more questions.

_What now?_

-

The skies are grey, like they always are, but the pavement remains dry and untouched.

Autumn fills the air with occasional warmth that Rantaro relishes. He wishes he could keep that warmth in a jar and take it with him, bring it to wherever it is he is going in a convenient little container that he can open whenever he wants to feel the light heat on his skin.

Leave it all behind, his mind tells him. Leave it and go, because you cannot bring everything you want with you.

He hopes that there is warmth where he is going.

(Wherever that is.)

-

Rantaro understands how he died.

He knows who killed him.

And yet, he feels no desire for revenge, no passion to hurt her.

The only thing he wants to do is leave her, leave it all behind, leave this bare apartment and this saddened world filled with defeat that he knows he brought upon himself.

Rantaro hates self pity, hates feeling small and helpless, but now he sits on his uncovered bed unable to feel anything but emptiness.

-

The next week, his bags are all packed.

Rantaro makes sure to clean out his kitchen and dining area, leaving every piece of the small apartment spotless except for one.

As he cleans the bathroom in the dark, he looks in the mirror and, upon seeing the bright green in his eyes, flinches just as he’s wiping down the surface.

He knows he’s made the right choice to go.

-

Days later, Rantaro decides to pay the recovery center a visit one last time. 

When he enters the common area, he tries not to make eye contact with the other faces in there, feeling awkward and out of place as usual. But when he looks towards the table that he’d learned to expect Kokichi to be sitting at everyday, he sees that the table is empty. 

He panics. 

-

He runs down every hall, peeking into every room, even being at the receiving end of a nurse’s fury after being all too nosy. His room was empty, as was the bathroom, and so was every room on that floor. It was as if he’d vanished into the air without a trace, and Rantaro almost drives himself crazy as he wonders for a moment if he was even ever real in the first place. Just as he paces down a hallway for what feels like the hundredth time, he hears a second pair of footsteps appear behind him. 

“Hey,” he hears a voice say. 

Rantaro turns around to be met with the sight of a smaller boy dressed in grey, his hand clenched in a feeble fist. 

“Hey,” Rantaro says softly, voice barely louder than a whisper. 

As Kokichi takes a step closer, Rantaro notices that his eyes are filled with something more. Something like a small spark of determination, maybe something more than that.

A shaky breath rattles through Rantaro’s chest as they look at each other for what feels like a moment too long.

“You’re going,” Kokichi says flatly. It’s not angry, but it’s not sad either; it’s blank and unreadable, just as he’s always been, and just like Rantaro wished his first words to Kokichi were, he wishes that the other boys’ words were filled with something more.

“Yeah,” he responds, and he’s whispering now, almost like his lungs are made of glass that are aching to break.

Kokichi closes his eyes for a few seconds, processing the words, and soon enough they shoot open and are filled with so much. They’re bright and they’re excited and maybe it is just an act, but his sudden outburst of emotion catches Rantaro off guard as his jaw falls open just a little bit.

“Amami’s gonna get out there and explore the world! Make sure you commit as many crimes as you can in my honor!”

Rantaro blinks, still slightly shaken from the sudden change of demeanor, but he thinks that perhaps this means that the other boy will be filled with something other than emptiness, and that’s good enough for him.

He smiles an easygoing smile, and it’s warm and real and happy, and it’s _his._ As he feels a rare bout of laughter bubble in his chest, Rantaro tilts his head back just slightly and closes his eyes as a soft chuckle escapes him.

“You know what? Maybe I will. Just for you.”

Kokichi blinks and Rantaro sees it flicker again—something new, something more, and even as Kokichi plasters on an overly large grin, Rantaro knows that there is something there that wasn’t there before.

He takes a step closer until he is so close that Rantaro that he can see the few stray strands that fall messily in front of his face. Green eyes stay stagnant, unsure what to do or where to look, and Kokichi’s face stays unreadable as they silently stare at each other, ignoring the white noise of the nurses around them. 

“Ouma…?”

The shorter boy says nothing, just continues to stare intently, and Rantaro’s not sure what he’s supposed to be doing or what he’s supposed to say and panic begins setting in until Rantaro realizes that the other boy is pushing something into the palm of his hand. He instinctively curls his fingers around it—it’s solid with structure but not cold, and most definitely made of paper, and before he can open his mouth to ask Kokichi what it is, he is pivoting on his heel away from Rantaro who is left staring wordlessly at the back of his head.

“Get out of here,” Kokichi says with his back still to Rantaro. It’s not malicious or angry, but surprisingly soft and maybe even genuine, and again Rantaro feels it—something more. It’s not empty or hollow but filled with body and intent, and he clutches the piece of paper a tiny bit harder like it’s the only thing grounding him to reality.

“I will,” he replies, his voice quiet.

Kokichi cranes his head towards the white ceiling and even though Rantaro cannot see, he has a feeling that the other boy is smiling. 

Without another word, Kokichi heads down the hallway, arms swinging carefree, and as he turns around the corner with an oak table tucked flush against the wall, Rantaro sees that he was right.

The green haired boy stands alone in the hallway, realizing that that was probably the last time he would ever see the other boy, and just as he always finds is the case, he wonders if he should have said something more. Something, anything.

He blinks, trying to process what just happened, until he remembers the piece of paper tucked into his hand.

He lifts it to his face to see what’s written on it, and as it meets his eyes, the corners of his mouth curl upward and his eyes crinkle into happy crescents as a warm laugh falls out of his chest.

Staring right back at him is a Joker card, playful and smiling and free, with a small self portrait of Kokichi at the top right corner. At the bottom of the card is something crudely written in Sharpie, and had he not known who the writer was, Rantaro would have mistaken it for a child’s handwriting.

“ _I hope you find what you’re looking for_.”

Tracing his index finger over each poorly scribbled letter, he feels his heart beat for what feels like the first time in his life, and Rantaro suddenly knows for sure that he is completely and utterly alive.

-

When he leaves, he is not running away anymore like he so previously thought, but looking for something.

Not someone, not a lost sister that doesn’t exist, not a secret door behind a bookshelf, but something else—something new, something more.

He holds the Joker card in between his thumb and index finger, eyes lingering on the messy writing, and smiles.

-

The card, he notices, is worn from being bent and handled and held.

It’s less glossy than the cards in his own deck, lacking shine from the amount of handling and usage it has seen up until this point.

He thinks he likes it that way.

-

Months later, Rantaro wakes up again in a bed far away from the place he left behind.

He is still alone, but his head feels clear, uncracked, pain nothing but a vague memory.

The bathroom light is on.

When he looks at his own reflection, and it is no longer scared and terrified, he thinks he sees it in his eyes, finally.

Something else.

-

The Joker card sits stagnant on his bedside table, an everyday reminder from the moment he wakes up that he is alive and breathing—not trapped in a game or a simulation, and no flash of white light is going to come and take him away. 

Occasionally, he’ll pick it up and trace his index finger along the messy handwriting, smiling to himself. 

_Maybe I haven’t found it yet_ , he thinks to himself one day.

_But someday_. 

-

It’s raining outside.

He opens the window and breathes in the cold air, feeling the freshness deep in his lungs.

He does not flinch, because he’s not afraid anymore.

-

How do you get over dying?

  
 _You live,_ he decides one day.

-

“My name is Rantaro Amami,” he says to himself softly, touching his fingertips to his jaw with a light hand so as not to break it, even though by now he knows that his skin is not going to shatter, green eyes do not mean that the library floor is waiting for him, and the rain does not mean he is dying.

“I’m not supposed to be alive.

But I am.”

-

_Something more._

_-_


End file.
